Previous literature shows that income taxation significantly affects the behavior of high-income earners and business owners. However, it is still unclear how much of the response is due to changes in effort and other real economic activity, and how much is caused by tax avoidance and tax...

The theory of optimal taxation has often been criticized for being of little practical policy relevance, due to a lack of robust theoretical results. This paper argues that recent advances in optimal tax theory has made that theory easier to apply and may help to explain some current trends in...

Analysen zur Struktur und der Verteilung eines Phänomens benötigen vor allem Mikrodaten, also Daten der individuell Betroffenen. Wir wollen in unserem vorliegenden Beitrag eine neue mächtige Mikrodatenquelle für Einkommensanalysen vorstellen, die Einkommensteuerstatistik mit anonymisierten...

Prior research suggests that start-up costs and taxes negatively influence entry into entrepreneurship. Yet, no distinction is made regarding the type of entrepreneurship, particularly innovative versus non-innovative entrepreneurship. Start-up costs, being one-off costs, may reduce the entry of...

Entrepreneurial activity is often regarded as an engine for economic growth and job creation. Through tax policy, governments possess a potential lever to influence the decisions of economic agents to start and close small businesses. In Germany, the top marginal income tax rates were reduced...

Decisions by firms and individuals on the extent of their tax payments have generally been treated as separate choices. Empirically, a positive relationship between corporate and personal income tax evasion can be observed. The theoretical analysis in this paper shows that a manager's decision...

In order to calculate the burden of a comprehensive and progressive income tax falling on a certain income source, an apportionment scheme for the entire tax burden has to be chosen. This raises the question of how to deal with losses, which is relevant for Germany in view of the heavy losses...

We investigate the effect of personal income tax (PIT) rates on the number of hours entrepreneurs work weekly. Using the rotating panel data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 2003 to 2019, we estimate instrumental variable regressions in first...

In this paper, we improve upon the Pissarides-Weber (PW) method for estimating tax evasion among the self-employed by utilizing unique register-based consumption measures from the Swedish and Finnish mandatory registers for pleasure boats. Our main contributions are twofold: i) The PW method...